Earth-tongue was beginning to grow old. His oldest son and one daughter both had children, and his hair showed first streaks of gray. He thought more of his youth, and commenced to remember what he had dreamed then. He knew he had seen Matavilya sick and gradually dying and burned, and his ashes washed away by the river that Mastamho made to flow out of the ground. He remembered too Mastamho’s house on Avikwa’me, with the multitudes inside it in rows like little children, and Mastamho instructing them; and how he repeated after him, correctly, until Mastamho said to him, “That is right! You know it! You have it! I gave it to you!” Then he had dreamed how Sky-rattle-snake was at last inveigled from his house far in the south ocean, and his head cut off on Avikwa’me. Earth-tongue saw his joints and blood and sweat and juices turn into eggs. From these eggs hatched Rattlesnake, Spider, Scorpion, and Yellow-ant, who went off to Three-Mountains and remote places, deep in the earth or high in the sky, and from there built four roads to all tribes. When they wish a man for a friend, they bite him and take his shadow home with them. “But another road leads from their house to my heart,” Earth-tongue would say, “and I know what they do. And I intercept the shadow before Rattlesnake has led it wholly to Three-Mountains, and sing it back; I break the roads of spittle that Spider has begun to wind four times around the man’s heart; and so he lives again.”
Then Earth-tongue commenced to be sent for when people were bitten—first his relatives, then others. He would stand up at once and sing to bring a cooling wind; and, reaching the sick person, sing over him from the north, west, south, and east, but not a fifth time, lest he die. Then, sending every one away but a wife or mother, and forbidding all drink, he would sit by the patient all night, singing his four songs from time to time. In the morning the sick person used to get up well.
Fighting interrupted these pursuits. It was a summons again from the Yuma, this time against the Maricopa; and two hundred of the Mohave responded. The seventh night they were on Maricopa soil and met eighty Yuma by appointment; and in the morning advanced to attack. But the Maricopa had got wind of their presence, and when the fight opened were reënforced by a vast number of the Pima. The Mohave and Yuma exhorted one another, and though man after man fell, gave ground slowly, fighting back outnumbered.